Richard Cunningham

“Ethnic jokes serve one purpose; to defuse ethnic tensions by normalising the differences between ethnicities. If we are not free to offend one another, then we are not free to make the kind of ethnic jokes that strengthen the social fabric of this country. Without the freedom to offend, we create a series of armed camps, each watching the others for any signs of transgression, both obsessed with defending the honour of their respective tribe. This can only divide a country by setting us apart from one another and making us strangers to our neighbours.”

Cicero, his Roman contemporary Cato the Younger, and his Roman philosophical successors, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, went some way to developing Latin Stoicism, which stood some distance from its Greek predecessor, tempered as it was with Roman values and martial culture, which in an imperial, militaristic power such as Rome, was quite different to that of the intellectual, comfortable lives of many Athenian Greek philosophers.